Observability - Chroma

Overview

Chroma provides comprehensive observability through OpenTelemetry integration for distributed tracing, structured logging, and metrics collection. This enables you to monitor performance, debug issues, and understand system behavior in production.

OpenTelemetry Integration

Chroma supports OpenTelemetry (OTel) for distributed tracing and observability. OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral standard for collecting telemetry data from your applications.

Configuration

Configure OpenTelemetry using environment variables or the Settings class:

from chromadb.config import Settings
import chromadb

client = chromadb.Client(Settings(
    chroma_otel_collection_endpoint="http://otel-collector:4317",
    chroma_otel_service_name="my-chroma-service",
    chroma_otel_collection_headers={
        "x-honeycomb-team": "YOUR_API_KEY"
    },
    chroma_otel_granularity="operation"
))

Or using environment variables:

export CHROMA_OTEL_COLLECTION_ENDPOINT="http://otel-collector:4317"
export CHROMA_OTEL_SERVICE_NAME="my-chroma-service"
export CHROMA_OTEL_GRANULARITY="operation"

OpenTelemetry Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
`chroma_otel_collection_endpoint`	`str`	`""`	OTLP endpoint (e.g., `http://localhost:4317`)
`chroma_otel_service_name`	`str`	`"chromadb"`	Service name for span tagging and aggregation
`chroma_otel_collection_headers`	`Dict[str, str]`	`{}`	Headers to send with spans (e.g., API keys)
`chroma_otel_granularity`	`str`	`None`	Tracing granularity level

Granularity Levels

Control the level of detail in traces with the chroma_otel_granularity setting:

none (default) - No spans emitted, OpenTelemetry disabled
operation - Spans for high-level operations (add, query, get, etc.)
operation_and_segment - Operations plus segment-level operations
all - Detailed spans for almost every method call (use for debugging only)

from chromadb.telemetry.opentelemetry import OpenTelemetryGranularity

# Recommended for production
settings = Settings(chroma_otel_granularity="operation")

# For debugging performance issues
settings = Settings(chroma_otel_granularity="all")

Custom Tracing

You can add custom spans and attributes to the current trace:

from chromadb.telemetry.opentelemetry import add_attributes_to_current_span

# Add custom attributes to current span
add_attributes_to_current_span({
    "user_id": "user123",
    "collection_name": "my_collection",
    "batch_size": 100
})

Decorating Methods with Tracing

Add tracing to your own methods:

from chromadb.telemetry.opentelemetry import (
    trace_method,
    OpenTelemetryGranularity
)

class MyService:
    @trace_method(
        "MyService.process_embeddings",
        OpenTelemetryGranularity.OPERATION,
        attributes={"service": "embedding_processor"}
    )
    def process_embeddings(self, documents):
        # Your code here
        pass
    
    @trace_method(
        "MyService.async_operation",
        OpenTelemetryGranularity.OPERATION
    )
    async def async_operation(self):
        # Works with async methods too
        pass

The decorator automatically handles both sync and async methods and adds the pod name attribute.

Local Observability Stack

Chroma provides a complete local observability stack with OpenTelemetry Collector and Zipkin for development and testing.

Running the Stack

From the Chroma repository root:

docker compose -f examples/observability/docker-compose.local-observability.yml up --build -d

This starts:

Chroma server with OpenTelemetry enabled
OpenTelemetry Collector - Receives and processes traces
Zipkin - Trace visualization UI

Accessing Zipkin UI

Open your browser to http://localhost:9411 to view traces in the Zipkin UI.

OpenTelemetry Collector Configuration

The collector configuration (otel-collector-config.yaml):

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
      http:

exporters:
  logging:
  zipkin:
    endpoint: "http://zipkin:9411/api/v2/spans"

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [zipkin]

Logging Configuration

Chroma uses Python’s standard logging with customizable configuration via YAML.

Default Logging Configuration

Chroma’s default logging configuration (log_config.yml):

version: 1
disable_existing_loggers: False

formatters:
  default:
    "()": uvicorn.logging.DefaultFormatter
    format: '%(levelprefix)s [%(asctime)s] %(message)s'
    use_colors: null
    datefmt: '%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S'
  access:
    "()": uvicorn.logging.AccessFormatter
    format: '%(levelprefix)s [%(asctime)s] %(client_addr)s - "%(request_line)s" %(status_code)s'
    datefmt: '%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S'

handlers:
  default:
    formatter: default
    class: logging.StreamHandler
    stream: ext://sys.stderr
  access:
    formatter: access
    class: logging.StreamHandler
    stream: ext://sys.stdout
  console:
    class: logging.StreamHandler
    stream: ext://sys.stdout
    formatter: default
  file:
    class: logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler
    filename: chroma.log
    formatter: default

loggers:
  root:
    level: WARN
    handlers: [console, file]
  chromadb:
    level: DEBUG
  uvicorn:
    level: INFO

Custom Logging Configuration

Create your own log_config.yml:

version: 1
disable_existing_loggers: False

formatters:
  json:
    class: pythonjsonlogger.jsonlogger.JsonFormatter
    format: '%(asctime)s %(name)s %(levelname)s %(message)s'

handlers:
  console:
    class: logging.StreamHandler
    formatter: json
    stream: ext://sys.stdout
  
  file:
    class: logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler
    filename: /var/log/chroma/chroma.log
    maxBytes: 10485760  # 10MB
    backupCount: 5
    formatter: json

loggers:
  root:
    level: INFO
    handlers: [console, file]
  chromadb:
    level: INFO
  chromadb.telemetry:
    level: DEBUG
  uvicorn:
    level: WARNING
  uvicorn.access:
    level: INFO
    handlers: [access]
    propagate: false

Load your custom configuration:

import logging.config
import yaml

with open("log_config.yml") as f:
    config = yaml.safe_load(f)
    logging.config.dictConfig(config)

Log Levels

Configure log levels per logger:

import logging

# Set global Chroma log level
logging.getLogger("chromadb").setLevel(logging.INFO)

# Fine-tune specific components
logging.getLogger("chromadb.api").setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
logging.getLogger("chromadb.db").setLevel(logging.WARNING)
logging.getLogger("chromadb.telemetry").setLevel(logging.ERROR)

Or via environment variables:

export CHROMA_LOG_LEVEL=INFO

Metrics Collection

Chroma emits metrics through OpenTelemetry that can be collected by your observability platform.

Key Metrics

Operation Metrics

Operation duration - Time taken for add, query, get, update, delete operations
Operation count - Number of operations executed
Batch size - Size of batches in batch operations

System Metrics

Memory usage - Memory consumption of segments and indices
Cache hit rate - LRU cache effectiveness
Database connections - Active database connection count

Query Metrics

Query latency - Time to execute queries
Results returned - Number of results per query
Index operations - HNSW/SPANN index operation counts

Exporting to Prometheus

Configure the OpenTelemetry Collector to export metrics to Prometheus:

# otel-collector-config.yaml
receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
      http:

exporters:
  prometheus:
    endpoint: "0.0.0.0:8889"
  logging:
    loglevel: debug

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [logging]
    metrics:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [prometheus]

Integration Examples

Honeycomb

from chromadb.config import Settings
import chromadb

client = chromadb.Client(Settings(
    chroma_otel_collection_endpoint="https://api.honeycomb.io:443",
    chroma_otel_service_name="chroma-production",
    chroma_otel_collection_headers={
        "x-honeycomb-team": "YOUR_API_KEY",
        "x-honeycomb-dataset": "chroma"
    },
    chroma_otel_granularity="operation"
))

Datadog

from chromadb.config import Settings
import chromadb

client = chromadb.Client(Settings(
    chroma_otel_collection_endpoint="http://localhost:4317",
    chroma_otel_service_name="chroma-production",
    chroma_otel_collection_headers={
        "dd-api-key": "YOUR_API_KEY"
    },
    chroma_otel_granularity="operation"
))

Configure the Datadog Agent to receive OTLP:

# datadog.yaml
otlp_config:
  receiver:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4317
      http:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4318

New Relic

from chromadb.config import Settings
import chromadb

client = chromadb.Client(Settings(
    chroma_otel_collection_endpoint="https://otlp.nr-data.net:4317",
    chroma_otel_service_name="chroma-production",
    chroma_otel_collection_headers={
        "api-key": "YOUR_LICENSE_KEY"
    },
    chroma_otel_granularity="operation"
))

Jaeger

# Run Jaeger all-in-one
docker run -d --name jaeger \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  -p 4318:4318 \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:latest

from chromadb.config import Settings
import chromadb

client = chromadb.Client(Settings(
    chroma_otel_collection_endpoint="http://localhost:4317",
    chroma_otel_service_name="chroma-dev",
    chroma_otel_granularity="operation"
))

View traces at http://localhost:16686

Product Telemetry

Chroma collects anonymous usage telemetry to improve the product.

Disabling Telemetry

from chromadb.config import Settings
import chromadb

client = chromadb.Client(Settings(
    anonymized_telemetry=False
))

Or via environment variable:

export ANONYMIZED_TELEMETRY=False

Custom Telemetry Implementation

from chromadb.config import Settings

settings = Settings(
    chroma_product_telemetry_impl="my_package.MyTelemetryClient"
)

Best Practices

Use appropriate granularity - Set to "operation" for production, "all" only when debugging
Add custom attributes - Include relevant context like user IDs, collection names, batch sizes
Monitor query latency - Track p50, p95, p99 query latencies
Set up alerts - Alert on high error rates, slow queries, memory pressure
Rotate log files - Use RotatingFileHandler to prevent disk space issues
Sample traces in high-volume - Configure sampling in the OTel collector for high-traffic deployments
Secure telemetry endpoints - Use TLS and authentication for production telemetry
Monitor resource usage - Track memory, CPU, and disk usage alongside application metrics

Troubleshooting

No traces appearing

Verify chroma_otel_granularity is not "none"
Check the OTel collector endpoint is reachable
Verify authentication headers are correct
Check collector logs for errors

High overhead from tracing

Reduce granularity from "all" to "operation"
Enable sampling in the OTel collector
Use asynchronous span export

Missing log output

Check log level configuration
Verify log handlers are configured correctly
Ensure log directory has write permissions
Check disable_existing_loggers is False

Next Steps

Configure Performance Tuning
Learn about Configuration options
Set up Migrations

Get Started

Core Concepts

Guides

Deployment

Operations

Documentation Index

​Overview

​OpenTelemetry Integration

​Configuration

​OpenTelemetry Settings

​Granularity Levels

​Custom Tracing

​Decorating Methods with Tracing

​Local Observability Stack

​Running the Stack

​Accessing Zipkin UI

​OpenTelemetry Collector Configuration

​Logging Configuration

​Default Logging Configuration

​Custom Logging Configuration

​Log Levels

​Metrics Collection

​Key Metrics

​Operation Metrics

​System Metrics

​Query Metrics

​Exporting to Prometheus

​Integration Examples

​Honeycomb

​Datadog

​New Relic

​Jaeger

​Product Telemetry

​Disabling Telemetry

​Custom Telemetry Implementation

​Best Practices

​Troubleshooting

​No traces appearing

​High overhead from tracing

​Missing log output

​Next Steps

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